Miranda Lambert: The First Thing That Came Naturally

And while she’d never brag about it, she admits that, yes, songwriting did come easy to her. Even when she was just a teenager.

“I was 17 when I started writing,” she said in an interview with Gibson Guitars. “My dad is a singer-songwriter, and he plays guitar. I felt I got it from him. I just loved it. I started playing guitar and wrote my first song, and it felt like the first thing that had ever come naturally to me.”

There’s a deep cut on her debut album Kerosene titled “Love Is Looking for You” that Lambert says is one of the earliest songs she wrote. It’s one she’s still very proud of.

“It took me a while to understand what I was saying with that song,” she admitted. “Writing something as a young kid, sometimes you go back and hear it from a different angle from how you heard it when you wrote it. A song you wrote when you were young can surprise you when you’re older.”

And she says she didn’t have to work really hard at songwriting like she did with everything else. She even sings about that in her song “Heart Like Mine”: “My brother got the brains of the family/So I thought I’d learn to sing.”

“I think it’s maybe something you’re either born with, or you’re not,” she said. “I feel like it’s God-given, for sure. I think you can hone your skill, but I also think you’re born with it. I’m always working to be a better songwriter and musician and singer, but it’s truly something I had in my blood.”